No Coupon Required: RelayRides Beats Car Rental Companies on Costs

RelayRides blogger Sydney Jarod explains how RelayRides is so much cheaper than traditional rental car companies that you will not even need a coupon.

The old way to find a rental car online won’t get you the best price anymore. You know how it goes: you decide on the perfect week-long getaway, or that short weekend hop to your favorite city, so you pull up a travel booking website and start looking for cars. They seem expensive, don’t they? Then you get the clever idea to use Google to find car rental coupons for your trip. Good call.

Unlike traditional car rental companies, RelayRides is so affordable that you won’t need a coupon

Well, maybe. That rental car coupon may lower the cost of a rental car somewhat, but the car is still at an inconvenient location (remember that airport you swore you’d never go back to?), you really hate the boring cars that are available at the times you want to rent and you know you’re just going to have a rental car customer service nightmare again.

Why settle for a trip that’s less than the best? You could start your trip the right way with RelayRides, and get the cheapest rates on your rental car, choose from a wide variety of cars at convenient locations near you and get the best customer service in the rental car business.

Let’s start the ‘Whys’ with money. In an apples-to-apples comparison that accounts for our incredible $300,000 ($1 million for owners of vehicles) guaranteed insurance policy on every trip, RelayRides is on average 20-30% cheaper than traditional car rental companies and 40-50% cheaper than ZipCar. Your coupons can’t beat those discounts.

The reason for our discount is simple. A traditional car company is a hugely capital intensive business. Imagine all the money required to buy a fleet of vehicles–spanning all vehicle classes–for each office location you lease that is staffed by the employees you hire, train and manage. That money quickly adds up. When you rent a car from a traditional car rental company, you are paying to cover a little bit of the cost of all those things.

Here at RelayRides, we do things differently. In fact, we’re revolutionizing the whole car sharing business model, because we’re not actually a rental company–we’re a peer-to-peer car sharing marketplace. We don’t employ rental agents, we don’t lease rental offices and we don’t own huge fleets of vehicles. RelayRides users own the cars, they log-on from their own homes, or offices, and they are their own rental agents. Just like that: low overhead and low capital costs. Those costs savings mean more money stays in your own pocket.

That difference opens up a lot of exciting benefits, too. When you rent a car from a RelayRides user in your neighborhood, most of that money goes to your neighbor–not some anonymous corporate headquarters. It also means that you can find any kind of car somewhere on RelayRides. Really, search our database. We put no restrictions on car types, so you’ll find everything from Carl’s 2008 Smart 2fortwo and Dan’s 2009 Civic Hybrid near San Francisco to Francis’ 2008 Jeep Wrangler and Michael’s 2001 BMW Z3 Roadster near Boston.

Our distributed community model also means a RelayRides car could be available anywhere–not just at some airport or at the some high-density urban area where a car agency can count on high utilization rates. Nope, that means our cars could anywhere–from the county to the suburbs to the city.

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RelayRides is the nation's largest peer to peer car rental marketplace, with vehicles in over 2,500 cities and 300 airports all across the country. We efficiently connect people who need a car with owners whose vehicle would otherwise go unused, backing each reservation with a $1M insurance policy.